On the home stretch

There's still work to be done but the light at the end of the kitchen garden tunnel is definitely visible, thank goodness!  Mind you, we'll be tackling the ornamental side of the garden next year which will also be something of a mammoth task 😩  Oh well, no rest for the wicked, I suppose LOL

I thought long and hard about how to set out the fruit cage area, and it took me a while to make a decision on whether to plant straight through the membrane into the soil or use raised beds.  As you can see, in the end I decided to use beds which Adrian is gradually filling with sieved soil from the raised beds in the back garden.  We haven't yet decided whether to just cage the individual beds or the whole area; I suspect we will end up doing the latter.

I have three vertical cordon fruit trees on order which are all supposed to be suitable for the climate up here (let's hope so, eh!): Scrumptious, which is a red-skinned dessert apple; Victoria plum; and a dessert cherry, Summer Sun.  They can be planted as closely as 2'-3' apart and are going in the bed where the rake is in the photograph.  Hopefully the stone walls will provide some protection.  I am considering planting spring bulbs with the trees next autumn, which I would like to use as cut flowers for the house rather than them being simply ornamental.

The other two beds will be for the black- and redcurrants which I've been growing from the cuttings a friend sent me.  We also plan to grow some raspberries.  I need to do a bit of research first, though, on which varieties would be best and which need the least amount of space, as they will be going in a long narrow bed in the remaining area in the lower part of the kitchen garden.

I also have strawberry plants on order, which will be going in one of the raised beds in the lower kitchen garden.     

We are a step closer towards "losing" the weed membrane ~ we had a couple of one tonne bags of Orkney Blue stone chippings delivered last Friday.  We originally thought we would have to have the bags put on the grass in the ornamental garden, but the delivery guy was able to swing them into the kitchen garden which has made life a little easier.  Our first task is to make the paths in the fruit cage, then we can spread out what's left in the lower garden ~ well, on the area that has membrane in place, anyway.  We thought that two tonnes would be such a lot of chippings but it's not going to go as far as we thought it would!  Adrian reckons we will most likely need at least another tonne ~ I see a lot of shovelling in our future 😉 

The broccoli has been a bit of a disaster ~ I have a lot of vegetable growing research to do over the winter LOL  But there are some florets that look as if they may be harvestable, which is a miracle considering how decimated the plants were by the cabbage white caterpillars!  Still, it's all a learning process and hopefully I will be more successful next year.

The plants I ordered from J.Parkers arrived and have now been put in a "nursery" bed until next spring.  They are supposedly garden-ready ~ which, to be fair, they would have been had we still been living down south ~ but I know from last year's experience that it will be better to let them sit out the winter in a raised bed.  I may also get some windbreak netting to protect them a little.

It's not the best photo, I know, but this pair of erigeron karvinskianus have spent a couple of months growing on in the raised bed and are now very much bigger than when they arrived.  I may plant them in the garden before the winter weather sets in.  I have quite a lot of these sweet little daisies dotted around the borders, and in the alpine bed too, but I can always find room for a couple more 😍 

And finally, I thought you might like to see a photograph of our neighbour's cat who plainly thinks that our garden is his judging by the amount of time he spends out there!  I can't actually remember what his name is but it's General somebody or other, named after a character in a book apparently.  I have to say that thus far he hasn't proved to be a very friendly cat, in fact he has been known to hiss if he thinks we are getting too close ~ I took this photo from the porch! ~ which is a tad rude considering this is our flippin garden LOL